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Jessica Xavier



On Discrimination

By Jessica Xavier


As a transpolitical activist, I have worked very hard for the past five years to end discrimination against transgendered people - especially employment discrimination. Former ICTLEP Executive Director and founder Phyllis Frye is absolutely correct when she identified employment discrimination as the most important issue for us middle class trannies. If you can keep or get a job, all things become possible - your gender transition, surgery, your new life. Without it, forget it. Hence our obsession with our inclusion in ENDA and in state bills that currently would only prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

I've listened to many - too many - employment discrimination stories of mytransgendered peers. They've been fired. They've been denied employment. They've faced hostile work environments, filled with what any reasonable person might call sexual harassment but isn't, due to three US Appellate Court decisions that denied transsexuals protection under Title VII. Some transsexual women I know have even been assaulted on the job. Real people. Real issues. Real discrimination.

Blessed with tolerant employers, I became an advocate for what is loftily called Equal Justice Under Law, writ large in marble over the front entrance to the US Supreme Court building in Washington. Others, of course, prefer to call my dream of equal employment opportunities special rights, and due to the current political climate, they seem more entitled to their opinion than I am to a job. Nevertheless, for the past five years, I have investigated, documented and even written testimony regarding acts of discrimination involving transgendered people. Each sad story made me angrier and work even harder, but through it all, I thought I was immune to it.

I was wrong. At the time I'm writing this, it's been seven full months since I've been laid off from my full-time job as a database administrator, after my former company lost the contract that paid all of my salary. I keep telling myself how lucky I am, since I know trannies in far worse positions than me. I saw my lay-off coming, and prepared for it by saving for six months. It seems far more common for transsexual people to lose our jobs with little or no warning.

I've gone off unemployment for a short time to do a bit of consulting work, but now I've nearly exhausted my unemployment, and I am becoming increasingly concerned about my financial situation. I've written about sixty resumes and gone on ten interviews - an enviable resume-to-interview ratio. But still no job. That tells me that I have a good resume with good skills and experience, that I can write a coherent cover letter, and that I am applying for positions appropriate for my skills and experience. But as soon as I show up for the interview - goodbye.

As much as I hate to self-victimize, I must confess that all this discrimination, compounded by money worries, is really getting to me. Failure to hire is nearly impossible to prove and very different from being fired from your job, but it still hurts. At one time, I thought I had passing privilege - that I passed as a nontranssexual woman. Many of my friends told me that I did, and although I told them I doubted it, I now realize that subconsciously I began to think I did. Even worse, I also began to take it for granted. Now I feel much differently, and I wish my charitable friends could go on these interviews with me.

On my last interview, the two women I interviewed with went as stiff as a board as soon as they saw me. They stared directly at their yellow legal pads as they asked me questions, refusing to make any eye contact with me. On another interview, I had to out myself, since the doctor who interviewed me knew several of the doctors I had worked with at the hospital where I had gender transitioned. I knew at least one of these doctors disapproved of my transition, and that both would not remember my new name. So I had to come clean - better from me than from them. The doctor, who was black, handled it very well, telling me he also knew something about discrimination. But I never got called for a second interview.

Generally, you can tell by the length of an interview and by the nature of the questions whether its merely perfunctory or you're in serious contention for a position. But I've experienced more than a few overt reactions which told me there would be no call back. I remember an interview early in my gender transition, when I had foolishly left a scientific paper with my old name on my CV, and one of my three interviewers spotted it. Again I had to out myself, and as the looks of shock spread around the room, I naively said that I hoped my transsexuality did not affect their decision. Of course it did - the company didn't even bother to send me a rejection notice after the interview. Later, I called them back and was told they had not one but two openings for the position I had interviewed. These two positions were later advertised twice by the company, and remained unfilled for over a year. Yet I was not hired, despite ten years experience in the field.

Living in Washington, DC I've also interviewed openly as a transsexual woman with several gay and lesbian organizations, or organizations where openly gay and lesbian people are employed. You would think my chances would be better, but no - transpeople, especially MTFs, face discrimination here as well. Transphobia crosses all sexual orientation lines, and even fair-minded gay and lesbian people seem to have difficulty working beside the straight world's stereotypes of themselves. In the more political gay and lesbian organizations, I have gotten the sense that trans people are simply not to be trusted, due to our advocacy for inclusion in gay and lesbian civil rights initiatives. In a recent address, NGLTF Executive Director Kerry Lobel bravely noted that a national gay and lesbian organization has yet to hire an openly transgendered full-time employee. Little wonder.

Yet another of the many ironies of my transgendered life has been to advocate for inclusion in gay and lesbian - sponsored anti-discrimination bills while searching for a job and encountering discrimination myself. Well, at least it makes you somewhat more credible. From my advocacy experience, the highest incidence of employment discrimination seems to fall on the blue collar trades, and there it often includes harassment and even violence. It's easy to make the classist assumption that those with less education are less tolerant of us, but as a professional, I have encountered another rationale for discrimination against transsexuals. We in the professions are expected to exercise a certain standard of professional judgement, to make the correct decisions in complex situations. Yet thanks to the American Psychiatric Association, transsexuals still bear the stigma of mental illness - Gender Identity Disorder. So quite understandably, it becomes impossible for most employers of professionals to be assured that a transsexual woman like me possesses that professional judgement. How can they possibly be expected to trust, let alone hire, someone who's done such a crazy thing - gender transition - that leads to an even more insane act - sex reassignment surgery, which includes parting with one's penis? In the white collar world, discrimination against transsexuals is simply less salient because it's more polite.

It's also very telling to note the different reactions to discrimination across a transgendered community already divided by class, race, class, full-time living status, sexual orientation and gender vector (MTF/FTM). As my good friend Nancy Sharp has pointed out, there is also another dividing line between those of us who have experienced discrimination first-hand and those of us who haven't. Those of us who have usually turn to those who haven't for support, which is simply not forthcoming - something which I find completely morally reprehensible. Sadly, ours is not a community that treats its victims of discrimination with any measure of understanding or respect, let alone compassion.

By far, the most common reaction seems to be blame the victim. Some crossdressers seem to think that anyone who gender transitions is making a big mistake. To them, living full-time is a starry-eyed dream, and thus getting fired or denied employment is your justly-deserved comeuppance. Some of the so-called "experts" on gender transition in the workplace will ask if you've proven yourself to be invaluable to your employer. If you lose your job, they immediately pass judgement and conclude that you haven't proven yourself essential to the success of your company, or worse, that you've simply become just a pain in the ass to them. Of course, this classist "strategy" assumes that we all are professionals with equal abilities and work for the same white-collar corporations eager to take advantage of our difficult situations. As with professional nontranssexual women, the double standard should be duly noted.

Perhaps worst of all is the selfish conceit, quiescent apathy and pathetic acceptance of the status quo that is usually found in lieu of real support for the victims of discrimination and advocacy efforts for change. The not-so-subtle subtext in MTF support groups for discrimination victims is that "she doesn't pass" and thus shouldn't have gender transitioned in the first place. And the tranny victim usually internalizes all of this unspoken nonsense as the gospel truth, buying into this poisonous conventional wisdom and thus completing her own self- victimization. This specious nonsense gets passed around ad infinitum, ad nauseam in our support groups, creating an atmosphere toxic to anyone's self- confidence, an essential ingredient for getting a job.

And I am not immune to it. Each time I've been read during an interview, it's chipped away at my usual extraordinary self-confidence. And I know when it happens - my interviewers will squirm in their seats, fidget with a pencil, stare at their paperwork - anything to avoid making eye contact with me, or to shorten the interview to as little as five minutes, just to get me out the door. And afterwards, I go home and cry, and wonder what gesture, what word, what piece of clothing gave me away. Was my hair too wind-blown? Was some piece of makeup out of place? Was my voice too low? Was I too assertive or too self-confident?

I know I'm not alone. I know that other trannies looking for work have asked some of these questions, too. But I'm more than positive there's one question that all of us who've experienced discrimination have asked ourselves, over and over again. Why me? I've asked myself that question a hundred times, even though I know the answer: discrimination happens, and that one day, I swear, I will help end it. Whether it's based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or gender variance, discrimination is wrong. Discrimination hurts people. Sure, you can discuss it in all the abstract academic, economic, political and sociological terms you want and make it sound very scholarly, statistical, artificial, far removed from the human reality of hatred and ignorance that causes it. But when you're caught in its jaws, you can only take discrimination one way - personally.

And so, every unemployed day, for no reason in particular, I get out of bed and spend my empty hours haunted by the same question. Why me? Being one of those obsessive types who believes that everything happens to us for a reason, I tried these reasons on for size and they all seem to fit. Perhaps I too was becoming too far removed from the actual experience of those for whom I have advocated. Perhaps I needed a reminder of the very real, very human pain that so many trans people suffer when discrimination rips our lives apart. Perhaps I needed yet another exercise in humility. Perhaps it's just more punishment for self-acceptance. Or perhaps, I just needed to write this essay.

Author's note: Eleven months after my layoff, after exhausting my unemployment and losing my health insurance, after sending out 120 cover letters and resumes, and going on 25 interviews without receiving a single job offer, I've given up looking for a full-time job. I'm now working without benefits as a part-time consultant to several gay and lesbian and AIDS service organizations in Washington, DC.

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